by Bobby Adair
Everybody got something to eat and drink. They took care of their personal business and then it was time for the hard part. Dr. Oaks got everyone’s attention. He held up one of the jugs of baking powder. “For this to work, we all need to strip naked and cover ourselves with this.”
Some mumbled. A few disagreed more loudly.
“Here’s the deal,” I told them in a voice that carried over their unhappy bitching. “First off, don’t be a prick. Lots of people died trying to keep you alive. I know you appreciate it but if you’ve got a better idea, be constructive about it, bring it up, don’t complain pointlessly.” I looked them over. “Anything?”
None of the grumblers looked at me.
“Okay. I don’t know if this is going to work. Feel free to stay in the storeroom if you want. The rest of us are leaving.” I glanced at Murphy and Grace. Jazz was out of sight somewhere. But it was clear to the academics who I was talking about. “Any of you who want to come along can—naked, covered in baking powder. It’s dark outside. As long as you don’t speak when you’re out there or do anything to bring attention to yourselves, like carry a gun, you’ll probably be okay. If you want your gun, stay here. You’re not coming with us.”
One of the grumblers raised his weapon, not pointed at anyone, but showing it to all of us. “We can’t even defend ourselves.”
I rolled my eyes. I didn’t want to get into it again.
“How many bullets do you have in there?” Grace asked him.
“Six.” He patted the magazine on the rifle.
“How many infected do you think are out there?” she pressed. “Are you going to kill them all with six bullets?”
Murphy laughed.
“If you shoot,” I told him, “then you’ll all die. That’s it. That’s the simple fact. One shot will bring every White who can hear it down on you. That’s the way it works out there. They know the only things that use guns are uninfected people. The Whites always come when shots are fired, always. Guns are the absolute last resort.”
“And if they attack us out there?” the grumbler asked.
It’s hard to convince people to change their mind to a proven truth from a strongly held belief.
“If they attack just you,” I said, “or any one or two of us,” I brandished my machete. “We’ll do what we can. But we’ll probably just leave you to save the rest.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “It is. But we don’t get to make the rules anymore. We live in their world now. Their rules. And it sucks. So if you get behind, if you get separated, if you get attacked, then whisper your prayers to yourself and take one for the team. If you start hollering for help, the rest of the Whites will come running faster than you can imagine. You’ll get everyone killed.”
Silence.
I let them stew for a few seconds before I continued. “I told you, it sucks. But it’s a take-it-or-leave-it deal. Accept the rules or stay here. We’ll leave in five minutes.”
I walked away, not going anywhere, just pretending like I had things to do so I wouldn’t have to entertain any belated questions. Grace walked up beside me. Murphy came along behind.
"You come across well in front of people,” she said. "Sometimes people, even people with PhDs, just want to be told what to do."
"Thanks.” I was still pissed at her but didn't want to seem like I was pouting. I looked up at Murphy. "What do you think?"
He shoved the head of a corpse with his foot—just fidgeting—as he gave the question a thought. “We need to do something. We can’t stay here.”
“Not the endorsement I was hoping for.” I sighed.
“Don’t get your panties in a wad.” Murphy grinned.
I couldn’t tell if it was a real grin or the fake one.
He said, "It's as good a plan as any. Hell, better than most. I never thought about that baking powder thing. As long as we don't get close to any Whites, I can't see why they'd bother us."
"And we're not going far,” said Grace, looking back at Dr. Oaks, who was talking with someone else. "He said the food service commissary is down the road three blocks, going away from campus. Good sized building. No windows. Only a few doors. We could be safe there—safer there than anywhere else we can think of for the moment.”
“Let’s hope so.” I looked at them both. “We need to do this single-file and run in one of those stupid helix patterns like they do. Emphasize that to everyone before we go out the door, okay? We need to sell this to the Whites outside.”
“Will do,” said Murphy.
“Of course,” Grace added.
“I’ll lead,” I told them. “I’ll keep it slow. I don’t want to lose Dr. Oaks by jogging too fast.”
“I’m worried about him,” said Grace. “I don’t know if he can even run. And that other old guy.” She pointed. “If he dropped on the ground and died on the way, it wouldn’t surprise me.”
“What do you want to do then?” I asked.
“Put the slowest ones at the rear,” she said.
Murphy looked surprised. “And leave ‘em if they can’t keep up?”
“I’ll stay with them,” she told us. “We’ll walk if we have to.”
“That’s a bad idea.” I tried to imagine an alternative.
She looked at Dr. Oaks again, her face concerned.
"Odds are,” I said, "He's going to die anyway. All of them have been exposed, or they soon will be. We know where that leads. Don't risk your life for nothing."
Grace nodded.
I didn’t believe her. “You stay with the old ones at the rear. Talk to Jazz before we go. If she hangs back with you, that’s cool with me.” I looked at Murphy for agreement. He nodded. “Murphy and me will take the rest down the street.” I turned toward Dr. Oaks. “Even as slow as he’ll be going, what do you think it’ll take, maybe twenty minutes?”
“If it takes longer than that,” Murphy chuckled, “he might die of old age.”
Grace rolled her eyes.
Chapter 32
We started down the street and just as Grace predicted, Dr. Oaks and the other guy whose name I didn’t know fell immediately behind. They didn’t even attempt to run. I guess they knew their limitations.
Or they’d already given up.
That thought angered me, but I put it aside. I didn't want Grace or Jazz risking their lives for people who'd already decided to let themselves die. But I had other contrary charges to take care of.
I jogged slowly, making a serpentine path across the parking lot and kept periodic watch over my shoulder to make sure all were doing as told, follow-the-leader. Whites were all over the place, some heading somewhere, some feeding on a carcass, many settling down inside of abandoned cars, in the buildings, or in the shrubs. Everybody wanted a warm, dry place to sleep.
As we crossed over a sidewalk and a strip of dead grass, I saw the outpost on the corner where I’d killed the Whites in the library. That brought back a lot of weird emotions I tried to turn into a memory of victory. I’d killed a lot of them in that room, single-handed. But I didn’t feel like Null Spot the Destroyer at the moment. More like a serial killer.
What did I need to do to get back in a Null Spot state of mind? Null Spot was confident and invincible. Zed Zane worried too much about shit that didn’t matter.
We passed non-descript little buildings on our right and another parking lot on the left. I kept my group jogging a slalom down the turn lane in the middle of the road. Ahead, it looked like the number of Whites thinned. Not many in the roads, and not many near the buildings along the way. Or they were there and just lurking in the night shadows, ready to fuck up my evening as soon as I started to think things were going well.
We passed over a crosswalk and past a bus with a wheel up on the curb. A couple of windows broken out. No surprise. We went past a row of greenhouses on the left, and through the glass walls I saw lots of movement. Nothing came out, though.
I was getting worried. Something had
to go wrong. Something always did.
And suddenly, there it was, a building with tall concrete walls, and no windows. Kitchen-style exhaust vents on the roof ensured we’d reached the place Dr. Oaks had described. I crossed the parking lot with my little band behind, took a look way up the street, and saw Grace with her slow followers still coming.
We entered the building through the front door and spread out into a lobby that contained no Whites. I stopped at the door and looked back up the street.
Murphy put a hand on my shoulder and whispered, “Don’t even think about it. They made their choice. You and me can’t go back to help them. We need to make sure this place is secure. There might be Whites. C’mon.”
Chapter 33
Our powder-coated people waited nervously in a hall while Murphy and I started the search. We were armed, and used to being naked—at least I was. They weren't. They were still holding hands over their private parts and looking at the walls and ceiling rather than each other.
Sorry kids. All the niceties of our old life are luxuries we can’t afford.
Murphy and I checked the front offices. Easy enough. A few had been ransacked. My guess was looters rather than Whites. The infected were much more vigorous and thorough than normals when they were looking for something to eat.
The industrial kitchen in back was too dark to see anything but the largest of black shapes against a murky background with glints of dull moonlight off stainless steel equipment. Skylights in the roof let the moonlight in.
“What do you think?” Murphy whispered as we stood in the door.
I shook my head. The kitchen might have been empty or a hundred Whites might have been sitting inside on the floor. I stepped out and pushed the door closed. I bit my lip while I thought about it. “We don’t have a light. We can’t run around campus trying to find one.”
Murphy agreed. “We’ve been lucky so far. Who knows what happens if we take these knuckleheads back outside.
I crossed the lobby and looked out the front door again. Grace and Jazz had covered half the distance with the two old professors.
Murphy came up beside me. “They’ll make it. What are we gonna do?”
I heaved a labored sigh. The only solution that came to mind was the unpleasant one. I crossed the lobby again to the hall that led to the offices, and pointed toward one of the doors off the corridor and told them, "Go in that office. Close the door. Be quiet about it. Oh, and if you hear a bunch of screaming in a minute, shove a desk in front of the door and hope for the best."
“What?” It was the grumbler from earlier. “You can’t just—”
Murphy stopped him with a raised hand and an angry face. "We're doing the best we can here, buddy. Okay? This is a risk for us too, man."
A woman grabbed the grumbler’s arm and tugged him toward the office. The other powder-coated people filed silently in.
“See if you can find a lighter or something in the desk,” I told them. Maybe we’d get lucky if the office belonged to a smoker.
Murphy and I crossed the lobby to get back to the kitchen door. We stopped, and he looked at me, feigning patience.
“You wanna hold the door open or ambush the ones who come out?” I asked.
“If there are a bunch of them in there it won’t matter.”
“Don’t be a pessimist,” I told him. “You take the door.”
Murphy stepped to one side and put a hand on the knob. I stood against the wall far enough from the doorway that I’d be able to get a full swing at anybody who came out. I nodded at Murphy. Ready.
He nodded back and swung the door open.
I tapped my machete on the doorjamb and waited.
Nothing but the echo of the sound came back to us.
I stepped closer to the door and leaned into the dark opening. “Dinner time, dipshits.”
I jumped back and raised my blade high.
Nothing.
“We can’t be this lucky,” Murphy whispered. He turned to face the dark kitchen. “Come on out of here and I’ll let you eat Zed first.”
No howls. No bare feet running on the unglazed tile floor. No kitchen equipment getting knocked around.
“I think it’s empty,” I said. “Maybe it was too dark for the Whites to want to go inside.”
“Maybe.”
“Go get them.” I pointed at the closed office door. “Get them inside the kitchen.” I went back to the front door and looked out the window and waited. The girls were almost to the parking lot in front of our new building.
Murphy, still whispering, just in case, herded the academics from the office into the kitchen. They shuffled around. They bumped things. They knocked metal utensils and pans, cursing through whispers when they did.
Still, no White in the building made a noise. We had to be alone. Unlikely, but there it was.
With tension building, because I just knew something had to go terribly wrong somewhere, I watched the girls shepherd their charges across the parking lot, up the few steps, and to the front door.
I swung it open, looking from side to side for the mob I expected to ambush me. They didn’t materialize.
"Thanks,” Dr. Oaks was out of breath, but he grabbed my arm for emphasis.
I pointed to the kitchen door at the back of the lobby.
Jazz asked, “Is everything okay? Are we safe?”
I nodded. “The place seems empty.”
“Seems?” Grace asked.
“Too dark to tell in the kitchen,” I told her. “But we checked it best we could.”
“We’re good, then?”
I was almost afraid to say it, like accepting that nothing had gone to shit would be akin to springing the trap on our good fortune. “Yes.”
Nothing bad happened. The trap didn’t spring.
I followed them into the kitchen.
Chapter 34
Not an hour after we got settled into the kitchen, one of the professors got the chills and started shivering with loudly chattering teeth. Everybody whispered among themselves in their little cliques while looking at barely visible black silhouettes of each other. They were cold, we all were. They tried to convince each other that the fever hadn’t caught one of their own. They reassured one another it couldn’t be happening so fast.
It had. They cultivated their pointless doubts. I had none. Soon, they’d all be infected. The comas would follow, then they’d start to wake, and mercy killings would necessarily follow.
Shiver. Sizzle. Coma. Die. My recipe for a successful conclusion.
I can be a real asshole in my thoughts.
But I prayed some of them would make it. They were still humanity’s hope.
Grace and Jazz went into the offices of the lobby for a meticulous search. A lighter or matches were our need. Hell, flint and steel would have been terrific if we could have found those.
I sat down on the floor in the lobby, just outside the door to the kitchen, leaning against the wall. Unless some Whites popped out to surprise us or came to break through the door in the lobby, my part in everything was finished until I went out to meet the helicopter in the morning.
Murphy came out of the blackness of the kitchen and stood in the doorway, leaning on the doorjamb. “Another sleepless night.”
“Yeah.” I agreed.
Inside, Dr. Oaks was talking softly to the feverish woman and a couple of others. He was trying to rally them around the plan we’d all agreed on. It was time to spread the infection.
Murphy squatted down and in a voice just above a whisper, he said, “If it doesn’t go well for her, she could turn by morning.”
I ran my fingers across the scarred blade laying on my knees. “Not a good way to go.”
“A bullet would be better,” he said. “Maybe she’ll last until Martin gets here with the helicopter.”
“What good would it do?” I asked. “He’s meeting us at the top of the pharmacy building. How would you get back here with your rifle? Hell, how will we get back here at all? W
e’ll need to have Martin pick us up and drop us somewhere else on campus.”
“Maybe we do a repeat of yesterday’s performance,” said Murphy. “Drop on the drilling field. They had to have reloaded the machine guns, right? There was plenty of that ammo in the other helicopters.”
"I don't see why they wouldn't, but you never know, right?” I looked over at Murphy. "Landing at Fort Hood won't be much less dangerous than landing here. And getting rearmed? It’ll be harder for them than us. We’re Whites. We can move among the infected. They can’t.”
“What if they don’t show?” Murphy asked.
I shrugged. I'd worried about it too. How trustworthy was Martin?
“Fritz is a good guy,” said Murphy. “He’s dependable. I trust him more than Martin.”
“I suppose you’re right. I guess if they don’t show tomorrow, then we go back to the roof the next day, maybe the day after.”
“After that?”
I shook my head.
“Yeah.” Murphy sat his hatchet and knife on the floor and rubbed his hands over his face. “If they don’t come by then, they’re not coming.”
“Anything can happen. Hell, for all we know, the helicopter sucked a bird into an engine and crashed just over the horizon.”
“You can stop with the sunshine now.” Murphy sat down.
“Sorry.”
“That’s okay. I know how you are.”
“Why don’t you try and get some sleep?”
Murphy looked at the door we’d entered the building through. “They’re out there.”
“I’ll wake you up if something happens.”
Murphy looked guilty.
"You sleep for an hour or two, and then I'll wake you, and I'll lie down. Cool?"
Murphy nodded and laid himself on the floor in the doorway. Why not? It was as good a piece of floor as any.
Chapter 35
The morning was grim. A dozen powdery people streaked in sweat and smudged from the dirty, cold floor were shivering because the temperature overnight had fallen to near freezing outside and our building didn't hold heat well. The professors who weren't shivering from the cold were shaking with fever or near comatose, lying motionless except for their breathing.
